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THE 



CHRISTIAN CHARACTER 



GEORGE WASHINGTON 



AN ADDRESS 



Delivered Sunday, February 22, 1891, in Saint Bar- 
tholomew's Church, New York City, 



THE NEW YORK SOCIETY OF THE SONS 
OF THE REVOLUTION, 



William Stevens Perry, D.D., Oxon., 

BISHOP OF IOWA, 

president of the IOWA SOCIETY OF THE SONS OF THE REVOLU- 
TION, AND A CHAPLAIN-GENERAL OF THE SOCIETY 
OF THE CINCINNATI. 



DAVENPORT, IOWA, 
1891. 






e^^'^ 
'^^ 

^\- 



The Christian Character of 
Washington.^* 



The reverent student of our American 
history finds in its pages the tracings of the 
Hand of God. It was of Him, Who orderth 
the end from the beginning, that we date 
the genesis of our nationality, not from 
Columbus and Spain, but from Cabot, the 
discoverer of the continent, sailing under 
the flag of Saint George. Mexico, the 
South American republics, — all the Latin 
communities of the new world, — rightly 
trace their lineage to Spain. But it was of 
God that our mother-land refused to rec- 
ognize the ecclesiastical fiat meting out the 
new world to Spaniards and Portuguese. 
It was of God that this refusal, maintained 
in many a struggle by sea and by land, and 
asserted at the cost of countless lives, 
secured the planting of our northern con- 
tinent by English settlers, and gave our 
fathers from the very first the rights of 
free-born Englishmen. The rivalry be- 
tween England and Spain, and, later, that 
with France ; and the firm purpose of our 

♦Address delivered by the Bishop of Iowa, at S- Bartholo- 
mew's Church, New York, Feb. 22, 1891, before the Sons of the 
Revolution, of the State of New York, on occasion of the one 
hundred and fifty-ninth anniversary of the birth of George 
Washington, February 22, 1732. 



ancestors across the sea to secure for Eng- 
land's crown and England's Church a share 
at least of the western world, were the mov- 
ing causes of discovery and settlement three 
centuries ago. But for these rivalries of 
peoples and faiths, the United States of 
America would neither have been colonized 
as they were, nor, in fact, would they exist 
as they do to-day. God willed that our 
sires should be of the sturdy Anglo-Saxon 
race, trained for the building of a common- 
wealth by English institutions and a robust 
English faith. God willed that our heri- 
tage as a nation should be the English 
common law, the English Magna Charta, 
the English constitution, the English Bible, 
the English Book of Common Prayer. God 
thus willed that race and faith should play 
no unimportant part in the founding of our 
nationality, the acquisition of our freedom. 
The religious aspect of the schemes for the 
discovery and colonization of our American 
shores, undertaken and furthered by Gil- 
bert, Raleigh, Popham, Gorges, De la Warr, 
and others of like chivalric spirit, and like 
Christian faith, compels attention no less 
than the political purposes these daring 
adventurers had in view. Men of our day 
and generation, impatient of creeds, of 
Churches, of Christ Himself, may claim 
that we are not a Christian nation; but 
it must ever remain true and undisputed 
that the foundations of our very being were 
laid in an intensity of prayer and in the 



— 3- 

faith and fear of God! That Hand of God, 
so plainly seen in the events of our earliest 
history as a people, appears again and again 
in the annals of our later years. AVe may 
not linger to tdll of the workings of Prov- 
idence in the blending of races, faiths and 
families, out of which has come to us the 
realization of Europe's dream, — the world's 
desire — a free state and a free Church. It 
is of God, and not the happening of blind 
chance, that we are the descendants of the 
Cavalier Churchmen of Virginia and the 
stern, strict Puritans of New England, the 
sturdy burghers of New Amsterdam and 
the enthusiastic "Pilgrims of Maryland," 
the gallant Huguenots of South Carolina, 
the peace-loving disciples of George Fox, 
and the transplanted covenanters of the 
land of Knox, — English, Welsh, Scotch, 
Irish, Hollanders, Germans, French, Swiss, 
Swedes, — it is out of this commingling of 
peoples that God has made us what we arej 
We may not pause to speak of marvellous 
interpositions, of strange, inexplicable prov- 
idences, of wonderful reliefs, of unlooked- 
for successes, marking the presence of God's 
Hand in moulding and shaping our coun- 
try's past. We cannot but believe, so 
marked, so evident, is this presence of a 
kind Providence at every step of our pro- 
gress, that this land has yet some noble 
mission to eJQfect in the approaching moral, 
political, religious, regeneration of the 
world. Ours is, indeed, the coming oppor- 



tanity, ours has beeu the long and patient 
preparation ; and in this glad and glorious 
future, so full of hope to all mankind, our 
fathers' God shall be our God, if we, with 
our fathers, recognize His presence and 
His power! 

To-day, — and to those who gather in this 
House of God, — sons of revolutionary sires, 
and proud of descent from the Christian 
heroes and the Christian statesmen who 
won for us on the field of battle or in the 
halls of legislation our national freedom 
and our national fame — we may limit our 
recognition of the workings of God in our 
history to the acknowledgment of the gift 
to us and to all mankind of Washington ! 

That Providence which designed " this 
unblemished gentleman," to fill the measure 
of man's highest, noblest aspirations, — 
which raised him up, as it had prepared of 
old the Lawgiver and Leader of Israel, to 
lead his people to liberty and national life, 
which trained him in early years by hard- 
ships and reverses for the work given him 
to do, could not fail to lay the foundations 
of Washington's character in a reverent 
and abiding sense of his relations to his 
God. It is on this ground that the rever- 
ence for his character is so deep and uni- 
versal. Washington was a Christian, fear- 
ing God and keeping His commandments. 
He ever attributed, — we quote his words, — 
"to the interposition of Providence; and 
not in any degree to his personal agency, 



6 — 



the complicated and mighty events of the 
Kevolution and the adoption of the general 
government; claiming only the merit due 
to an honest zeal for the good of his coun- 
try." In our admiration for the noble 
qualities displayed in the social, the mili- 
tary, the political life of Washington, we 
may never forget that they were based up- 
on that sole foundation which could sus- 
tain and develop them amidst the storms of 
of passion, the temptations of ambition, 
and the seductive allurements of almost un- 
limited power. George Washington feared 
God, and recognized in religion and moral- 
ity the sole sources of the proper character 
of a man and a citizen. The Father of his 
country was good in his greatness and great 
in his goodness! 

We are all well aware that there were 
those in the past, as there are some in mod- 
ern days, who would have us believe that 
Washington was only in outward seeming 
and show a believer in Christ. Mean men, 
doubting the reality of a nobleness they 
cannot comprehend, and unwilling to rec- 
ognize as the source of Washington's great- 
ness that reverent love and fear of God of 
which they are wholly ignorant, would seek 
to detract from his Christian character; 
and would have us regard him as a dissem- 
bler and a hypocrite, using the phrases and 
aping the manners of a holiness he did not 
possess. But these detractors forget that 
Washington's life, from the cradle to the 



-6 — 

grave, was consistently Christian. His 
religious character grew with his years and 
deepened with his growth. In youth, in 
inanhood, in age; in public and in private; 
in words and in deeds, he ever displayed 
that reverent recognition of the require- 
ments, the restraints, the sustaining hopes 
of Christianity which prove the inner spir- 
itual life — which attest his possession of 
what he himself has styled a " genuine, 
vital religion." The transcription of fixed 
rules for his conduct, speech and feelings, 
from the dicfation of his excellent clerical 
instructor,* marked his early years, and 
show the increase of the boy "in wisdom and 
in stature and in favor with God and man." 
His filial love and obedience, built upon 
the "commandment with promise," were 
conspicuous in his youth; and the dutiful 
son of a widowed mother was rewarded by 
God with long life and lasting renown. In 
an age the gross immorality and irrever- 
ence of which are detailed in tales too foul 
to read, Washington's youth was pure; his 
manhood was undefiled. At a time when 
irreligion was fashionable, and even the 
restraint^ of morality were ignored by youth 
of family and fortune, we find the young 
Virginian colonel, then but a little past his 
majority, acting as his own chaplain, read- 
ing prayers Sunday after Sunday at the 
head of his regiment on the frontiers, with 
a motley crowd of worshippers — Indians, 

* The Rev. James Mayre, rector of Fredericksburg, Va. 



_7-^ 

half- breeds, back- woodsmen and soldiers, 
— gathered reverently about him. Eecog- 
nizing the hand of Providence in his pres- 
ervation at the massacre in which Braddock 
fell, it was Washington who read at mid- 
night the Church's Office for Burial over 
his general's remains. At home, the tem- 
poralities as well as the spiritualities of his 
parish engrossed his thoughts and cares, 
and the devout lay-reader who had per- 
formed so faithfully the chaplain's work on 
the frontiers, became in peace a builder of 
churches and interested in every detail of 
parochial work. He was a constant attend- 
ant at the House of God, and his behavior 
there was ever so devout and reverential as 
to produce the happiest effects on the whole 
congregation. AVhile never boasting of his 
religious feelings, he never shrank from the 
confession of his recognition of the pres- 
ance and power of God. His devotion was 
not simply an outward show. The hypo- 
crite is not apt to note in the privacy of a 
diary, open alone to the eye of God, his 
fasting and prayer when his country was 
in peril. The indifferent and Godless man 
will not kneel in an agony of outspoken, 
fervent supplication, as Washington did, 
at the partiug of a loved one's soul. The 
soldier and legislator was not ashamed, 
alone of his fellows, to bow the knee in 
prayer when, at the session of Continental 
Congress in Carpenter's Hall, Philadelphia, 
1774, the offices of the Church were used 



— 8 — 

to preface the deliberations that were to 
yield to us a little later the prize of inde- 
pendence. At the head of the army he 
was humane, compassionate and forbearing, 
— a Christian leader in all things. The 
vices of the camp were sternly rebuked. 
God was owned, and honored in all that he 
did or said. It were impossible to simulate 
or affect the evident naturalness of the con- 
stant recognition of God in His providence, 
shaping the course of human affairs, seen 
in Washington's general orders, in his 
state papers, in addresses, in letters and in 
his private diaries. We may not forget 
the scene at Valley Forge when, on his 
knees, far away as he supposed from human 
eye, the general of the army was overheard 
praying to that God who rules the destinies 
of nations for his country's safety and her 
ultimate success. Kneeling at the chancel 
rail, as was his wont in early life, to receive 
the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of 
Christ it was perhaps from necessity, — for 
chaplains were scarce and services few, — 
or it may have been from a scrupulous con- 
science in view of the distractions of war 
and the work of carnage occupying his 
thoughts, that he but rarely, if, indeed, on 
more than one or two occasions during the 
war, engaged in this crowning act of Chris- 
tian worship. There is abundant testimony 
that, at the close of the strife, and from 
time to time in after years, he was again 
a communicating member of the Church of 



Christ. We know his reverence for the 
Lord's Day; his habitual reading of God's 
Word; his daily retirement for meditation 
and prayer, his regular attendance on 
church, and his abundant deeds of Chris- 
tian charity; and we may not question the 
testimony of Chief Justice Marshall, — his 
friend and biographer, — that he was, in- 
deed, "a sincere believer in the Christian 
faith and a truly devout man." Death 
found him ready for the great change. He 
could say, "I am not afraid to go" — "'Tis 
well;" and with the open Word of God be- 
side him and the words of prayer arising 
from stricken hearts about him, he closed 
his eyes on earth only to open them in the 
Paradise of God, beholding the King in 
His beauty. 

God be praised for the gift to us of 
Washington, the patriot, the soldier, the 
hero, the statesman, the Christian! It is 
"this unblemished gentleman" who is the 
central figure of our country's past; the 
model for the present time, the heritage of 
all succeeding years. H^life was "right 
as it respected his God, his country, and 
himself." His memory is our tie of broth- 
erhood. His name is the watchword of our 
freedom, and that of all the world! 



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